Realistically, an elector is most likely to defect if it could result in a better candidate of his own party getting elected. If three Republican electors pick some other candidate, that candidate will have the third-highest vote total, and will thus be a legal choice for the House of Representatives voting in state blocs. Since 28 of the state blocks are Republican, no Democrat can possibly win.

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I think John McCain is the obvious choice. He can carry the Democratic states, since the Democrats will know that Gore can't win, and they want to stop Bush. He can probably unite some of the evenly split states. And he can get a few of the Republican states, particularly Arizona, with some persuading.

What has been lost amidst the rhetoric as to who is "stealing" the election is the fact that, at this point, we will likely never be certain as to who truly received the most votes. At some point, a result will be recorded and taken as fact for the sake of history, but the dismal truth of the matter is that we have an election separated by only two-tenths of a percent nationwide, and, as of the latest recount, by only five-thousandths of a percent in Florida. A mere three hundred votes out of six million cast separate the candidates [at the time of writing], and we are meant to believe that "the will of the people" can still be discerned? The continuing jihad over who can claim to be on the side of objectivity loses sight of the fact that, at this point, any method of tabulating the votes likely has a margin of error greater than the real difference separating the candidates. In the argument of man versus machine counting, neither side should presume to be "holier-than-thou," because, in fact, both sides are simply trying to win.

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The post-election debate has been rife with petty squabbling and posturing by both parties, with terms such as "disenfranchising" and "stealing the election" tossed about with little concern for accuracy, but rather as shallow attempts to distort public opinion. Legally, either side can drag this struggle on ad infinitum; the matter will only be resolved when one candidate decides he is the bigger man, and, in effect, agrees to forfeit the struggle out of his sense of patriotism. Unfortunately, were either of these men that great, the election would not have been so closely divided, and these issues would never have arisen.

It is true, as Press Box notes, that network election predictions are almost always right. But one reason for this is that most races are not tight. Counting these no-brainer vote projections as evidence of genius is absurd. The other reason is that calling a tight race has a likelihood of making it so. The voters who have not yet voted for the anointed loser don't bother. Presto—another incidence of genius.

Press Box misses the point about the outrage over network predictions. One study—and there have been several reported—indicates that many Bush voters in Florida simply went home after the first Gore call (when the polls were still open). In other words, the problem with the networks is not simply that they get it wrong, but that calling close elections influences their outcome. That is the question under discussion in the upcoming hearings.